Bill Cheng's Blog, page 138
January 12, 2013
sagansense:
Listen Live to Whale Songs From Hawaii The...
Listen Live to Whale Songs From Hawaii
The gurgles, whistles, and squeaks of humpback whales singing off Hawaii’s island shores can now be heard live, courtesy of underwater microphones placed near Puako, Hawaii by the Jupiter Research Foundation.
Eavesdropping on this underwater soundscape reveals that the enormous marine mammals — which can reach more than 15 meters (50 feet) long — at times sound like cows, coyotes or UFOs.
Male humpbacks can sing for hours, a behavior thought to play a role in attracting mates. Their all-day chorus contains repeating low-frequency notes and melodies that can be heard many kilometers away. Females also vocalize, but they don’t sing.
Humpbacks congregate near Hawaii in late December to breed, and stick around through April. In 2003, the Jupiter Research Foundation dropped its first hydrophone into the islands’ warm coastal waters and they’ve been broadcasting the sounds each year since 2004; this year’s broadcast just went live last week. Deployed along with a heavy anchor, the hydrophones sit at a depth of about 18 meters (60 feet). They connect to solar-powered buoys on the surface that transmit signals to a radio relay station in the Kohala mountains.
Photo: NOAA/Doug Perrine
amazing
January 11, 2013
"Did you know that for every $1.00 invested in public libraries around the state, Texans receive..."
- The study was prepared for the Texas State Library and Archives Commission by the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Texas, Austin. (via rachelfershleiser)
Liz Moore
A big thank you to Liz Moore, fellow Hunter alum, whose post about this site has led to a sudden influx of new followers (which I’m given to understand is important for this sort of thing).
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already read her moving and soulful novel Heft (W. W. Norton) which is scooping accolades left and right. If not, hop to!
Just this month Heft was named to the January Book Club of the Buffalo News and was selected by the esteemed Ed Champion (of the Bat Segundo Show) as one of his best picks of 2012.
Liz also used to work with Zeke Schein who unearthed the famous new photo of a young Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines.
Liz, I was trying to find a photo of the two of us together from our Hunter days but it looks like we’re just going to have to take one when you’re back in town.
January 10, 2013
An Analysis of Infant Abdunctions, edited by Ann Wolbert Burgess and Kenneth V. Lanning
An excerpt:
The morning of the abduction she purchased nurses’ shoes and spent the rest of the day relaxing. At 11:00 P.M. she returned to the hospital and slipped into her scrubs in a bathroom. Since access to the nursery was through the nurses’ station, she approached the nursery nurse; leaned on the counter as she had seen other nurses do; and told her that the infant’s mother, “Mrs. B,” wanted to see her child. Candice chose that infant because her name was the easiest to read through the nursery window. The nurse told her it was OK, and when Candice tried to wheel the infant out in her crib the nurse told her to simply carry the child to keep the noise level down. Taking the infant to the first floor bathroom Candice removed her scrubs and walked out the front door of the hospital. She took care of the infant in the motel room until driving back to her hometown.
Comprehensive report can be found here.
January 9, 2013
On Speed Reading
I’m reading a manuscript right now— the “Swiss cheese draft”, as he likes to call it, of my friend Sunil Yapa’s book. So far I’m loving it. There are things to fix, of course. Every great book, after all, is born out of its holes. Powerful sentences hidden under weaker ones. Maybe a phrase or two that can be firmed up or slimmed down. An idea that could be clarified.
I’ve had it for a while now and I haven’t gotten very far. You see, it takes me a while to read anything. In an hour, I can get through maybe fifteen pages. When I’m reading— especially friends’ manuscripts— my eye tracks back. I test the words, I test the phrases, knock sentences up against the mighty oak of its native paragraph. In short I do the opposite of what this video suggests.
From word to word, I crawl and pore, mouthing every one of them in husky breath. I don’t skim ahead or pick apart the bones or ignore the pauses or otherwise defile the careful rhythms of this book.
Because there are more important things than speed and efficiency. There is sound. There is breath. In every word, every noun and verb and article and part of speech, in every last comma, every last striking punctuation. Every aspirated sound chaining one into the next into the one following, until… my God do I even have to explain?
I do not speed read because my friend, like me, loves words. Worked damned hard in putting them there. He deliberated and sweated and crafted and mulled and don’t you dare skip a one.
Because reading and writing are just different sides of talking. Because that is all we want to do as readers and writers. We want to talk to each other and in so doing glimpse that part of ourselves we wish so much to share.
Admittedly, speed reading is a bit of a straw man especially when there are far greater threats to literacy in the world today but I think it belies a far deeper erosion. An inclination toward the easy. Toward the abridged. The thumbnail sketch. The plot summary. The character limit. A whole species gifted with speech, with mouth parts and throat parts that spin thought into song and instead we’d rather scan and click and ping and tweet. Soundlessly.
So I read slow and it’s worth it because he’s right. It’s Swiss cheese. Bold and flavorful and delicious. A feast for the willing.
January 8, 2013
Peg Leg Sam Jackson - Born for Back Luck
You may remember Peg Leg Sam from Amelie. Find the full video here.
Peg Leg Sam Jackson - Born for HardLuck
You may remember Peg Leg Sam from Amelie. Find the full video here.
January 7, 2013
thesciencellama:
NASA’s Kepler Discovers 461 New Planet...
NASA’s Kepler Discovers 461 New Planet Candidates
As of January 7, 2013 Kepler has discovered 2,740 potential planets orbiting 2,036 stars and among the 461 new discoveries, 4 of them are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit their sun’s habitable zone.
“The large number of multi-candidate systems being found by Kepler implies that a substantial fraction of exoplanets reside in flat multi-planet systems,” said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “This is consistent with what we know about our own planetary neighborhood.”
Kepler discovers these candidates by measuring the brightness of the Sun as a planet passes by it or transits the star causing it to dim slightly. These candidates need additional, follow up, observations to be confirmed as planets. At the beginning of 2012, there were 33 candidates that were confirmed as planets, now there are 105.
“The analysis of increasingly longer time periods of Kepler data uncovers smaller planets in longer period orbits— orbital periods similar to Earth’s,” said Steve Howell, Kepler mission project scientist at Ames. “It is no longer a question of will we find a true Earth analogue, but a question of when.”
Family of a fur trapper, 1935 (Louisiana)
It took some finding, but I finally rooted out this photo from an old e-mail sent by my friend Kaitlyn Greenidge (whose book is going to burn up the world). Sent to me after a particularly rough workshop session at Hunter College.
To Elsie by William Carlos Williams
[Referred to me by Phil Klay, another pal from Hunter College whose short story collection and other fine works I am awaiting with great anticipation. It is pinned above my desk at the office. Originally source from The Collected Poems: Volume I 1909-1939 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1945) ]
The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags—succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she’ll be rescued by an
agent—
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs—
some doctor’s family, some Elsie—
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
